The Red Hourglass

Rating:
Summary: Surprised and Confused
Review: I picked up this book (its still on the shelves) because the author gave a really bad review to a book I really liked and I thought his book must then be lousy. Actually the Red Hour Glass is a great book-- it's slightly on the creepy side of riveting nature writing but Grice seems to deserve his accolades-- his absorption in the micro-world is incredible. However, the sensitivities of his book seem incongruous with his referring to the science topics in the recent Nabokov's Blues (Zoland Books) "trivial" and uncompelling. That is beyond me since they involved endangered species and questions of the origins of entire continents of animals and plants. Perhaps these larger issues are not his favorites or he was grinding some axe against those authors. Doesn't make sense; the Red Hour Glass is a good book but the book about Nabokov couldn't have been written in the same way-- its a different kind of topic. Well, read both and you'll probably find both compelling. "Trivial" endangered species are not, nor is working on these plants and animals before they go extinct.

Rating:
Summary: the sinister fascination of notorious predators is gripping
Review: Only an author so fascinated by spiders that he admits to spending hours watching them spin their gossamer webs, could weave such a series of tales about animal predators. The contents of this book indicate that the reader will soon be immersed in essays about black widows, mantids, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, pigs, dogs, and the brown recluse . . . but this belies the fact that Grice often, and with great ease, segues between families, orders, and whole kingdoms of life. Halfway thru the "widow" chapter in fact, Grice begins his first of many deviations from the subject at hand, peppering the reader with facts about various beetle species and the short-lived caterpillar that becomes lunch. In the midst of the "mantid" chapter, we not only learn that baboons are pack hunters, but that leopards have a taste for human flesh - a grisly fact that is borne out by the fossil record. This is not a book for the squeamish or for people preferring to encounter wildlife behind a glass window of a terrarium exhibit in the zoo.

The "rattlesnake" chapter reads like a Stephen King novel (with the plot removed) as Grice introduces us to haunting images of winter dens full of seething masses of poisonous snakes, details of the flesh-eating venom rattlers possess, and introductions to a whole host of the judgment-challenged humans who participate in rattlesnake roundups for fun and profit. And, for good measure he combines all this with descriptions of the terror of what it must be like to be buried alive.

Perhaps Grice says it best when he writes, "To understand the pig, we should now take a long detour into the lives of insects and salamanders."

I heartily recommend this book to anyone wanting to take a detour into the natural world without leaving the comfort of their armchair. _The Red Hourglass_ is a well-written map to the fascinating animal/animal interactions which drive life on this planet. Up and down the food chain, everybody gets an opportunity to be a predator, and it's not always the big and strong (and human) who survive.

Rating:
Summary: Grice takes on arthropods with Poe-like sensitivity
Review: What the reader gets with this book are seven essays written by a literary/humanities based college professor on seven particular predators: the black widow, the praying mantis, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, pigs, dogs, and the brown recluse spider. The writing is surpisingly good and the subject matter, while somewhat dark and gory, is fascinating.

The reader from Michigan calls this book 'backyard naturalism' in a derogatory manner. I am a biology major and, although the majority of Grice's claims appear consistent with similar data I have seen, this is not a hard science book; criticizing it in that context is an apples verses oranges category mistake. Conversely, I praise this work as 'backyard naturalism' at its best. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Red Hourglass from front to back. Take a bit of Peter Matthiessen's literary organicism, a pinch of Steven King's macabre involvment, E. O. Wilson's entomology, a dash of Desiderius Erasmus' sad, pragmatic humor, and some of Montaigne's candor, and you can wile away sumptuous moments zoosynthesizing the adventure of the 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' crossed with a bored boy's deific experimentation with arthropods, among other animals; all written with starkness and skill. What's a long pig? one may ask. The very sight of egregious brown recluse bites makes me kiss the soil of northern California.

This book is a good mix of the literary and scientific milieus. It draws one in by the curiousity and repulsion of the subject matter as ruse for the author's peculiar expository skill.